In previous years, when a cardholder requested a replacement or temporary financial card, there were no minimum production or delivery standards that ensured any competitive or quality service levels. For example, card delivery to a cardholder often could take as all long as one week and could require cardholders to pick up their cards at inconvenient locations. As a more specific example, if a cardholder lost or misplaced his/her credit card while on an extended out of town trip, the cardholder would have had to have contacted his/her credit card company, canceled the credit card, and had another card issued. However, credit card companies mailed the replacement credit card to the mailing address associated with the cardholder that was on file with the credit card company, which, in most cases, was the primary residence of the cardholder. Therefore, the cardholder would not receive his/her card until returning home from his/her extended trip. Further, the card could typically take up to as long as a week to be delivered to the address on file and required activation from the telephone number that is also on file with the credit card company.
In most recent years, in order to improve production and delivery standards, MasterCard and some outsourcers (also referred to herein as “card providers”) have provided temporary card services including 24-hour, toll-free, multilingual global customer service operations and guaranteed prompt delivery (e.g., next day delivery in some areas and 2-day delivery in other areas). However, as travel destinations have become more diverse, and security measure to prevent fraud have become more stringent, the ability to meet “emergency grade” delivery goals (e.g., one or two business days, as discussed above) have become strained. Furthermore, the advent of EMV chip, PIN, smart, and maestro cards in several markets has accelerated, causing increasing difficulty in the creation of replacement or temporary cards in addition to meeting acceptable delivery expectations. Moreover, currently, it is necessary for card providers to securely exchange, with card issuers, a number of cryptographic keys corresponding to the banks identification numbers (BINs). This process involves significant time and effort, and in some cases, involves systems developed by the card issuer, not the card provider.
As more capabilities are added to temporary card services, more cryptographic keys are required to be exchanged (e.g., Pin keys, CVV/CVC keys, Chip keys, EMV keys, etc.) between card providers and card issuers. Key exchange is already a significant overhead for issuers, and the temporary card services add additional overhead with the need to support more keys and customers.
Furthermore, it would be necessary to maintain a database of the cryptographic keys associated to all BINs (bank identification number) in order to identify the issuer of a card and to properly route authorization request messages over existing payment card networks. Maintaining such a database is virtually impossible as the number of financial institutions is boundless worldwide (e.g., 22,000+ card issuing banks).
Thus, a need exists for a prompt-response and secure card issuing system that provides temporary financial transaction cards having excellent global acceptance and offering the cardholder the same payment services as permanent financial transaction cards. A need also exists for a card issuing system that significantly reduces card issuer impact. A further need exists for a card issuing system that does not require key exchange with card issuers.